Issue: The Sunday Times Style December, 2006 *Exclusive! Please credit if you repost it. A Calvin Klein contract, and American Vogue cover and a fledgling movie career -- Gemma Ward, the 6ft, otherworldly Australian beauty, has ticked all the supermodel boxes, and she's not even not even out of her teen. Kay Montano meets the face of the moment. It's a blisteringly sunny California day, and Gemma Ward is sitting on the lawn of a supersized Los Angeles mansion while her make-up is touched up and her surfer-girl hair is teased into a perfect chignon. In a few minutes, she will step before the camera for a prestigious magazine cover story -- here role is to play Grace Kelly, opposite George Clooney's Cary Grant. Most women would be salivating at the chance to get up close and personal with one of Hollywood's leading men. Ward, though is unfazed. For the 19-year-old Australian model, it's just another day at the office. Over the past four years, Ward's trajectory has been anything but ordinary. At 16, she appeared on the cver of American Vogue, the youngest model on the shoot. "It was a gatefold cover with all the top girls," she says with obvious pride. "I was in there, along with Gisele [Bundchen], Natalia [Vodianova] and Karen [Elson]." Since then, the wide-eyed beauty for Calvin Klein, Valentino and Prada, and stalked the world's most prestigious runways. "Gemma is dimension," the fashion photographer Nick Knight declared recently. And her otherwordly look has starred something. In her wake have come a legion of doll-faced beauties, including ethereal Lily Cold and baby-faced Jessica Stam. Ward's rise began inauspiciously in Perth, Australia. Her dad was a GP, her mother ran a children's nursery and her early life could hardly have been more ordinary, That changed when her schoolfriends entered her into a television model competition without telling her. "They knew there was no way I would ever enter it otherwise," she says, "I went to meet my friends in the local sports centre. When I got there, I found myself surrounded by a camera crew, with my friends giggling, I was only 14." The rest should have been fashion history, but Ward didn't win the competition. She didn't even make the final, which shows how much faith you should put in reality TV. Instead, she began modelling part-time for local magazines. Her big break came a year later, when her picture landed on the desk of a New York agency. Her features struck a chord and she was signed up immediately. Her first big gig was the coveted Prada campaign. Ward moved to New York and soon started living life at a supermodel pace. She seems to genuinely thrive on the chao and excitement of her high-fashion lifestyle. "I have always felt an eccentric person, and I'm drawn to strange and unpredictable things, so I enjoy adapting to situations," she says. Ward also has ambitions beyond fashion. She had always planned to go to drama school, and still has her sights set on an acting career. It's too early to call her the new Cameron Diaz, but she has had minor success, landing a role in the new Live Tyler movie The Strangers and starring with Toni Collette in the forthcoming film The Black Balloon. Despite having the world at her feel, there's nothing brattish about her. "Outside work, I forget what I do for a living and I never talk about it, even with my model friends," she says, "It just doesn't enter my personal life." Asked about what she likes to eat, she avoids the usual beautiful-people answer, sushi. "Vegemite on toast with avocado and an egg," she gushes, her huge blue eyes lighting up. "It reminds me of Sundays as a kid, listening to Dad trying to play his guitar." Ward's job may take her all over the world, but her heart is still in Perth. "I'm very close to my family and friends in Australia," she says. Even in New York, her gang of Aussic mates keep her free of A-list pretensions. "I hang out with Australians. A gang of us are going to Costa Rica to surf all day and play card on the beach at night." As well as surfing, Ward play footballs and takes part in Ultimate Frisbee. "It's a kind of cross between nerball and rugby, but with a Frisbee," she explains. All this high-adrenaline activity has resulted in a model physique that is strong and long, as opposed to skinny and Twiglet-like, though even Ward has to work at her looks, especially in the run-up to the international fashion shows. "Shows season is like a marathon, and models have to train for it," she says, "We exercise more and, yes, we cut back on what we eat." She doesn't deny that staying skinny is part of the job, though she says that she would never starve herself. "It's important to keep a healthy mind about it, though not all the girls do." Ward's determination to be both grounded and gorgeous is typical of the low-key but high-earning girls who are becoming today's modelling superstars. The smart ones know that when it comes to their career, divas no longer last. Ward is nost definitely here to stay.